Talent Is Always Conscious Of Its Own

Macbeth's Self-justifications Were Feeble - And His Conscience Devoured Him. Yes, Even Iago Was A Little Lamb Too. The Imagination And The Spiritual Strength Of Shakespeare's Evildoers Stopped Short At A Dozen Corpses. Because They Had No Ideology.

It Was Only When I Lay There On The Rotting Prison Straw That I Sensed Within Myself The First Stirrings Of Good. Gradually It Was Disclosed To Me That The Line Separating Good And Evil Passes Not Between States Nor Between Social Classes Nor Between Political Parties, But Right Through Every Human Heart, Through All Human Hearts. And That Is Why I Turn Back To The Years Of My Imprisonment And Say, Sometimes To The Astonishment Of Those About Me, Bless You, Prison, For Having Been A Part Of My Life.

Prayers Are Like Those Appeals Of Ours. Either They Don't Get Through Or They're Returned With 'rejected' Scrawled Across 'em.

What Is An Optimist? The Man Who Says, "it's Worse Everywhere Else. We're Better Off Than The Rest Of The World. We've Been Lucky." He Is Happy With Things As They Are And He Doesn't Torment Himself. What Is A Pessimist? The Man Who Says, "things Are Fine Everywhere But Here. Everyone Else Is Better Off Than We Are. We're The Only Ones Who've Had A Bad Break." He Torments Himself Continually.

In The Camp, This Meant Committing My Verse-many Thousands Of Lines-to Memory. To Help Me With This I Improvised Decimal Counting Beads And, In Transit Prisons, Broke Up Matchsticks And Used The Fragments As Tallies. As I Approached The End Of My Sentences I Grew More Confident Of My Powers Of Memory, And Began Writing Down And Memorizing Prose-dialogue At First, But Then, Bit By Bit, Whole Densely Written Passages. My Memory Found Room For Them! It Worked. But More And More Of My Time-in The End As Much As One Week Every Month-went Into The Regular Repetition Of All I Had Memorized.